(This piece was published in The Chicago Tribune on September 29, 2024).

George H.W. Bush, who was then vice president, selected the little-known 41-year-old U.S. Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate when Bush ran for president in 1988.

The boyish-looking Quayle tried to dismiss concerns about his age and inexperience by frequently comparing himself to John F. Kennedy, who had served as a congressman and senator before running for president in 1960.

“I have as much experience … as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency,” Quayle said during his debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen on Oct. 5, 1988.

Bentsen, a longtime Texas senator, was waiting for the comparison.

“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mind. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” Bentsen famously drawled.

The crowd applauded and jeered.

Quayle, obviously stunned by the response, uttered, “That was really uncalled for.” 

I was among the roughly 50 million people watching.

Quayle’s face remains frozen in time 36 years later — the chastened expression of a boy sent to his room without his chocolate pudding. 

The Bentsen-Quayle exchange remains perhaps the most famous moment in the history of American political debates. It is a cautionary tale that keeps politicians up the night before a debate. Politics is a dog-eat-dog business — and no politician wants to end up on the Quayle end of a fire hydrant. 

Bush and Quayle won the presidential election, but Quayle never recovered from the humiliation.

Quayle’s term as vice president was marked by a series of gaffes. In an effort to correct a 12-year-old student who had correctly spelled the word “potato,” the vice president ended up misspelling the word. He butchered the motto of the United Negro College Fund by saying “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

Quayle became a national laughingstock — a punch line in search of a joke.

I dedicated one book of political humor, “I’ll Be Sober in the Morning,” to Quayle and included a chapter on the Bentsen-Quayle debate in my 2020 book “The Art of the Political Putdown.”

Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance will participate in the vice presidential debate on Tuesday.

The video of the Bentsen-Quayle debate will be shown in the days and hours preceding the vice presidential debate as it is every four years in the days and hours preceding the debate.

People will snicker at Quayle as they do every time they see it.

Not me. Quayle deserves our thanks, not our laughter. He saved America four years ago. (Kind of.)

Donald Trump clearly lost the 2020 presidential election. Voters said so. Recounts said so. Judges said so. They tossed out dozens of Trump’s lawsuits challenging the election results. But Trump continued to think he could overturn the results of the election by, among other things, having his vice president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify the election in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Constitution did not give Pence that power, but the obsequious Pence did not want to disappoint his president.

Robert Costa and Bob Woodward, in their book “Peril,” wrote that Pence wanted desperately to accede to Trump’s pressure and reject the certification of the election. Pence turned to Quayle, who, like Pence, had served as an Indiana congressman before becoming vice president of the United States. 

Quayle told Pence he could not do what Trump had ordered him to do.

“Mike,” Quayle told Pence, according to Costa and Woodward’s book, “you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”

Pence kept pressuring Quayle. Quayle did not budge.

Pence told Trump he could not do what the president demanded. 

When Trump couldn’t legally win the presidency, he unleashed a mob to try to overturn the election with violence. 

The republic held — in part because of Quayle.

We owe Quayle our appreciation.